Matthew Arnold

"Hark! ah, the nightingale — The tawny-throated! Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! hark! — what pain!"

"How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again — thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!"

"I am past thirty, and three parts iced over."

"Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power."

"The same heart beats in every human breast."

"A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again."

"A man becomes aware of his life's flow... And there arrives a lull in the hot race."

"And then he thinks he knows The Hills where his life rose, And the Sea where it goes."

"Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore."

"How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still."

"Their ineffectual feuds and feeble hates, Shadows of hates, but they distress them still."

"Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again! For so the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day."

"But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok’d souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will."

"This truth — to prove, and make thine own: ‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.’"

"Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates."

"With women the heart argues, not the mind."

"Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself."

"It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think."

"It is — last stage of all — When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man."

"Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat."

"Hath man no second life? — Pitch this one high!"

"Was Christ a man like us? — Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!"

"The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again."

"Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head and give The ill he cannot cure a name."

"Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory!"

"I will not say that thou wast true, Yet let me say that thou wast fair! And they that lovely face who view, They should not ask if truth be there."

"Style...is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it."

"The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure."

"The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly."

"Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel — below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed."

"At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is."

"The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

"Choose equality."

"Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class."

"For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."

"Eutrapelia. "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners."

"English civilization — the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society — that is what interests me."

"That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation."

"What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty."

"If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers."

"Such a price The Gods exact for song; To become what we sing."

"Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind? He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men, Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen, And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind."

"But be his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole."

"Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole: The mellow glory of the Attic stage."

"Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good."

"Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask — Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge."

"And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure, Didst tread on earth unguess'd at. — Better so! All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, Find their sole speech in that victorious brow."

"The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of god-like power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!"

"Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings, By contemplation of diviner things."

"Ere the parting kiss be dry, Quick, thy tablets, Memory!"